Sir

You report Monsanto's indecision about promoting its ‘terminator’ technology for sterilizing crop seed (Nature 396, 503; 1998). Terminator is becoming a classic case of ‘transnational Luddism’.

Monsanto will profit most if the technology spreads to developing countries, reducing their need to import grain. Monsanto's self-interest in exporting seed technology is the opposite to the economic interests of North American farmers who produce most of the world's grain exports. Opponents of technology transfer — including the ‘prairie’ non-governmental organization (NGO), the Rural Advancement Foundation International mentioned in your report — sensibly try to protect American grain exports by lobbying worldwide against Monsanto. It seems that national economic interests are best met by developing ‘terminator’ and, more widely, the technology of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), yourself and then persuading competitors overseas not to use them by exporting Luddite anti-technology scaremongering.

Why all the fuss now about sterile seed? For several millennia farmers have propagated bananas clonally, producing sterile triploids — ‘terminated’ bananas. No-one can steal farmer-varieties by planting banana seed: banana farmers are well in advance of Monsanto in protecting intellectual property.

As for GMOs, for more than 5,000 years wheat has been a genetic monster with entire ‘alien’ complements of genes from three species. This wide hybridization allowed wheat to spread to just about everywhere on the agricultural frontier. If plant breeders tried to repeat this miracle now to feed developing countries there would be an outcry from Luddite NGOs and conservationists: research would be halted, and there would be no food for more than a billion people.

Farmers in developing countries do not need the NGO mixture of paternalism and export protectionism, disguised as ‘in the farmers’ interests'. It is patronizing to claim that farmers will be ‘hooked’ on sterile seed technology: they will make rational decisions in their own interests. And one suspects that Third World farmers do not relish the role assigned to them by these NGOs of museum-keepers of obsolete varieties for our plant breeding needs.